


A Part So Far Entwined

by Zee (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles, F/F, Fix-It, Gen, Pre-Slash, Scourge Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Zee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Finally! You took forever to die, I almost fell asleep watching and waiting for you to show up,” Vriska says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Part So Far Entwined

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Olive_the_Olive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Olive_the_Olive/gifts).



> Warning for vague mentions of canon violence done to Terezi by Gamzee, and vague mentions of their relationship in general. Warning for the possibility of non-canonical character death, I guess? Basically it's Schrodinger's Character Death.

When you wake up, you are immediately aware of not being in pain anymore, and it’s both a welcome relief and cause for alarm. There’s dirt underneath your cheek and your blindfold is no longer tied around your head. When you roll over on your back, you see the Alternian sky. So a dream bubble, but that doesn’t tell you whether you’re asleep or just dead.

Getting to your feet, you can see that the hive right in front of you is Equius’s. Which means that Vriska’s can’t be far. You’ve never been to her hive before, but you know that she and Equius were neighbors. 

This was where you always wanted to end up when the meteor was passing through the dream bubbles, but now that you’re actually here it just makes you nervous. You don’t want to find Vriska, you just want your own block in your own hive. You might not be able to feel any wounds while you’re asleep, but your memory of every bruise Gamzee inflicted is plenty fresh. Even though you’re already asleep, you still want to curl up in your own recuperacoon and sleep some more. Is it possible to fall asleep in a dream bubble while your physical self is already unconscious? 

You’re well aware that you could very well be dead rather than asleep, but you’re trying not to think about that possibility. You don’t remember. 

You start walking in the direction of Vriska’s hive, giving Equius’s hive as wide a berth as possible. You wonder how long it will take before you remember what happened, before you figure out whether you’re dead or asleep. 

Vriska is waiting for you outside her door, leaning against the wall of her hive. You immediately recognize the look on her face: it’s that smile she gets when she’s sure she knows how a situation is going to play out. You feel immediately annoyed, even though every time you pictured this meeting you imagined yourself being remorseful; and it makes you think of Aranea faking you out by pretending to be Vriska, and that makes you think about the mess Aranea’s made of the living world, and you get even angrier. All before Vriska’s said a word. This reunion is gonna go great. 

“Finally! You took forever to die, I almost fell asleep watching and waiting for you to show up,” she says, pushing herself off the wall. 

You feel an uncomfortable jolt when Vriska mentions you dying, which of course is what she’s trying to provoke. “I don’t believe you.” 

“About what? That you lingered annoyingly like some coward afraid of death? Because it was just as snivelly as it sounds.”

“That I died,” you say. “I could just be asleep.” 

Vriska shrugs. “Sure. You could be. Hey have you ever actually seen my block? I should show you, it’s awesome!” Now she’s grinning at you, grabbing for your hand and changing the subject as lighting-fast as she always used to. For some reason it’s this habit of hers that hits you with the nostalgia and regret, and you can’t speak past the sudden lump in your protein chute. You just nod and let her lead you inside her hive. 

You have only seen Vriska’s block once before, when you were FLARPing around here and you got badly injured after trying to go against an older goldblood. Vriska had to bring you back to her hive to patch you up. That had been close to the beginning of Team Scourge, and Vriska had refused to let you see her lusus. You know that if it had happened just a sweep later, Vriska would have brought you down to look her lusus in its eyes just to try and scare you.

Her block is different than it was when you saw it at five sweeps old. Everything looks the same, but there are broken 8-balls littering the floor, and bits and pieces of pirate costume have been collected in the corners. For some reason it makes you sad. 

“I’ve only been hanging out here since we abandoned that lame-ass pirate ship,” Vriska says. “But it’s only temporary. This is a dumb block for grubs.” 

Vriska stops saying stuff then, prodding at a broken 8-ball with her foot and looking down at the floor. You get the feeling that she’s waiting for you to make the next move, and you think about all that stuff you said to Aranea when Aranea was pretending to be Vriska, and you wonder if she actually passed any of your feelings onto Vriska. It would have been very unlike her to keep her mouth shut and not interfere with what she saw as a relationship that needed healing. Stupid Aranea. Now there’s all this weird expectation and you _still_ don’t know what to say and it’s just awkward. 

How are you going to do this? ‘Sorry’ is on the tip of your tongue but you’re not sure it’s that simple, or if it’s anywhere close to being enough. And maybe if you apologize it will just make Vriska even angrier at you. Sure, she hasn’t seemed mad, but maybe she’s just trying to manipulate you into apologizing and then she’ll say that you deserve to feel sorry about it for forever and that she hates you and that she’ll never ever forgive you. 

You think the words ‘I’m sorry’ but what comes out is, “I think about killing you all the time.”

Vriska stares at you, for once surprised enough not to have an immediate comeback. You try to make it better, stumbling over your words. “I think about how it could have gone differently, I mean. Or maybe it had to go that way. I don’t know. But it’s always on my mind.”

Vriska continues to look at you without words for a moment, and then she snaps back into herself. “Of course it didn’t have to go that way! You could have, I don’t know, trusted me maybe? Radical concept!”

“You had just killed Tavros! You were going to get the rest of us killed too!”

“Maybe, but do you have any idea how boring it is to be dead? It sucks and you can’t affect anything and it’s your fault that I’m stuck here.”

“I’m sorry that I made it impossible for you to keep running around and messing things up,” you snap, and as soon as you’ve said the words, the lump in your protein chute loosens up. You swallow. “I’m sorry. Sorry that I killed you.”

Vriska had been doing a great impression of someone genuinely pissed at you, but as soon as you apologize she just grins. “I knew you’d get there eventually.”

“Shut up!”

Vriska laughs, waving a hand. “Whatever! Doesn’t it seem like forever ago that you stabbed me in the back?”

“No. It feels like just yesterday to me.”

“Oh. Well, stop feeling that way. It wasn’t yesterday, get over it already.” 

“Easy for you to say. You’re the one who’s dead.”

“Not anymore! Take a look at your eyes Terezi, they look pretty white from here.”

You had already opened your mouth to retort but the reminder of your (not definite) death stops you. You take a step back until your back is leaning against the wall, and Vriska seems to have realized what she just said and looks kind of guilty about it. For a moment there it had felt like you were both six sweeps old again and bickering between campaigns, but that’s not what this is; one or both of you is dead and most of your friends are dead or evil and shit is going down that you don’t understand. 

“Did Gamzee really kill me?” You ask, hating how childish and small your voice sounds even to yourself.

Vriska winces, and her voice is softer when she answers. “I… don’t actually know. I didn’t see what happened. I’m sorry.”

You shake your head, not up to responding. It’s not that the thought of being dead freaks you out (well, of course it does, at least a little bit); you just don’t want it to have been Gamzee that killed you.

“You have terrible taste in kismeses, by the way,” Vriska says, folding her arms and tossing her hair. As usual she doesn’t know when to shut up. “I bet you wouldn’t have hooked up with him if I’d been around to talk you out of it.”

“Ugh.” You really don’t want to think about anything you ever did with that shitty clown. Just the thought of him makes your jaw throb with pain . “That didn’t start until after she restored my sight. Why is your ancestor so much worse than all the rest of ours combined?”

“Ugh! Don’t even talk to me about her, I had nothing to do with that trainwreck. She’s ruining everything. You were probably the only one who would've had the globes to stop her, and if you're really dead then none of those other idiots stand a chance."

That makes you smile. You don’t know where Vriska got her conviction in your ability to handle things, but she’s always been that way, maintaining this bizarre faith in your capability even when she was attacking you. 

You walk over to the window to avoid meeting her eyes again. Vriska’s block seems too small for the way she’s looking at you, the worry and regret and a yearning for your friendship that you’re not used to seeing her express so openly. Out the window you can see the canyon with her lusus, and even though you know that it’s just a memory of a lusus, you still feel a visceral shudder at seeing it. It’s just a memory, so Vriska doesn’t have to keep feeding it. That’s not a new realization but it still makes you sort of happy for her sake. 

“Can we get out of here?” You ask without turning around, and a rocky staircase appears leading out of Vriska’s window, over her lusus, going down and down to a destination that you can’t see. Vriska comes over to push her window open and steps out of it first, with you behind her. 

You don’t talk as you walk down the stairs. You’re content to look at Vriska in front of you, her hair long and tangled as it always is, her hips swaying in more of a swagger than a walk. You don’t think she’s changed, not really, and you’re surprised to realize that you didn’t really want her to--you wanted Vriska to still be the person you’ve been missing all this time. 

When the stairs finally meet the ground, you’ve walked far away from Vriska’s hive and are on the beach. When you glance around, you realize that there’s the occasional Faygo bottle lying abandoned on the sand, and you can see a hive in the distance. You hate how sick you feel upon the realization that this must be Gamzee’s beach. You hate that you want to run away even though you know he’s not here.

You expect Vriska to say something mean about Gamzee clearly being on your mind, but she doesn’t say anything as she surveys the landscape. Maybe Feferi’s out in that ocean, feeding dead cuttlefish. If you’re truly dead then you’ll have more company than you had on the meteor for the last three years.

“I’m sorry for killing Tavros,” Vriska says abruptly. When you look at her, she groans and rolls her eyes. “Although I don’t know why I’m telling you, because I already apologized to him about it. _He_ totally forgives me for the whole thing.”

You know that that’s not true, and Vriska isn’t even doing a very good job of pretending that she thinks it’s true. Still, it’s something, some kind of expression good will. Or at least you hope it is. It’s so hard to tell with her.

“Thanks,” you say. The two of you are standing only a foot apart, and you remember the way you used to giddily grab at each other after super successful Scourge missions. You think that if Dave were here, he would say something like, _for fuck’s sake, this isn’t that complicated, you clearly just want to hug your friend, why are you overthinking it so much._ But then, that would only be if Dave understood anything about Vriska or you or what both of you have done, and you know he doesn’t.

“If you’re going to stick around, we could use you!” Vriska brightens again, whipping around to grab your arms and not seeming to notice when you bristle. “Meenah and I were gonna ditch the ghost army plan because we figured anything that Aranea wound up with would end up being totally shitty, but with your help I’ll bet we could get it going again.”

Yeah, right. “How do you figure that?”

“Your Seer of Mind abilities! You can see outcomes and use that to convince ghosts that the right thing is to come with us.” Seeing the skepticism on your face, she adds “Or something, I don’t know. We could also come up with a whole new plan instead, one that kicks so much more ass.”

She squeezes your arms hard before letting her hands drop to her sides. You don’t have the heart to tell Vriska that you’re not going to be of any help at all. But then if it’s a choice between staying here or waking up and facing Gamzee again…

“You realize that if I stick around and we pretend like we’re FLARPing again, that will mean I’m dead.” You meant it to come out mean but instead you just sound young and weak. You expect Vriska to laugh in your face and mock you for it, but instead she looks guilty. 

Granted, the guilt only lasts for half a second on her face before she’s rolling her eyes. “If you’re dead then you’ll be dead either way,” she points out. “And look, I know that we’re supposed to feel very very bad about all those people you manipulated into dying back in the day--”

“All those people that _we_ manipulated and then _you_ killed--”

“--So think of this as a way to make up for it! You can use your powers for justice this time around.”

It makes you laugh, how well Vriska thinks she knows you. She’s also not wrong. 

“This is going to fail miserably,” you say, and Vriska grins and grabs your hand because she knows when you’re saying yes. 

“You’re such a liar! You just don’t want to admit that you like my plan.” 

You shake your head. An impulse washes over you, and before you can think better of it you yank Vriska into you, hugging her roughly with one arm while keeping your other arm straight, gripping her hand in yours so tightly that you can feel her knuckles pressing hard into the fleshy underside of your fingers. 

Over her shoulder you can see the ocean. It doesn’t tell you whether or not you’re alive. 

“I _don’t_ like your plan,” you say. Vriska’s other hand comes up to feel your hair, and you then her fingers wrap around one of your horns. It makes you tense and think of Gamzee, but she’s not going to try to yank on it to expose your throat and hurt your head. Or at least you don’t think she will.

As if she could read your mind, Vriska’s grip titans on your horn and she pulls back, but not hard, just enough to tilt your head up. You know that she’s just trying to get a rise out of you, but it works, and you’re snarling. “Stop it!”

Surprising you again, Vriska actually does: she lets go of your horn and your hand and takes a step back. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I wouldn’t--I’m not Gamzee.”

“Yeah right! Anyway, I don’t care.” You know that your words are a flimsy cover-up for how hard you’re breathing. It would be obvious to anyone how much you care. You wrap your arms around yourself, squeezing your arms in the same spots where Vriska was holding you just a few moments ago.

Vriska sighs and meets your eyes, her mouth a stubborn line. “You don’t have to trust me. Just come with me.”

You swallow and let your hands drop, straightening your shoulders. You can’t trust Vriska, you know that you can’t, but you think you can give her this much. You give her a nod, and the both of you turn to walk back up the stairs.


End file.
